by D. J. Butler
“Dang it, Sarah!” he barked, and then he realized where he had smelled that riverbank smell before.
This wasn’t Sarah.
It was one of those clay-not-a-man things he’d struggled with on the slopes of Calhoun Mountain. But how? He narrowly avoided another swipe at his face. How did this monster get a face and a voice at all, and especially how did it come to look and sound exactly like Sarah?
Well, in any case, he knew how to deal with them.
Lord hates a man as can’t throw an honest punch when it’s called for. He winced with both the emotional and the physical pain of it, but hauled off and slammed not-Sarah as hard as he could with his knuckles, right in the face. Its nose flattened and completely disappeared into its Sarah-face, without the faintest hint of blood. It rocked back from the force of Cal’s blow, and he grabbed for his purse, yanking it from underneath his belt and jerking at the drawstrings to open it and get at the silver inside.
Not-Sarah slapped his hands, stinging his fingers with the violence of the blow. He lost his grip on the purse, bobbled it, and then not-Sarah smacked his hands up and the bag went sailing away—in a high arc that dropped it, splash!, into the middle of the river.
Jerusalem! He thought of the silver bullets he’d cast…but his pouch of bullets was with his powderhorns and the Elector’s rifle, back at Crowder’s. He didn’t relish the thought of sprinting through the woods with this beast slashing at his back. There had to be another way.
Cal dropped a shoulder and punched it into not-Sarah’s chest, grabbing it by the shoulders as if to wrassle, and then heaving with all his might. It punched at him, landing blows on his chest and back that would show as bruises the next day, and then he threw the clay monster into the air and—
whumph!—
hard on the ground onto its back. The sound it made as it hit the river rocks was wet and squishy. It sounded boneless. It sounded like a sack of wet corn mush slapping onto a hardwood floor. He turned to face not-Sarah and backed away, grunting from the pain in his ribs and slipping the tomahawk into his hand.
The tomahawk hadn’t worked very well against these things on Calhoun Mountain; he had gone for the creature’s head, and the axe had just sunk in harmlessly. This time, he’d go for a different target.
Not-Sarah pulled itself off the ground with a sucking sound, rolling sideways, and Cal got a glimpse of its back. It was dimpled with large indentations now, cratered and pocked like one of the fancy cheeses Cal had tried once in an overpriced tavern in Raleigh, and its spine, if it had one, now bent sideways. Landing on the stones had smashed the creature all out of its Sarah-shape.
Calvin hesitated and not-Sarah launched itself at him again, hands extended and arms growing longer.
Was that even possible?
Cal stepped aside and swung the tomahawk down in a swift overhand blow. The sharp, heavy head of the war axe sliced cleanly through not-Sarah’s wrist, completely severing the hand. No bone. The blow felt like cutting through rich, rock-free soil with a spade or a mattock, and the severed stump was gray and bloodless.
What unearthly thing was this? He didn’t think any of the Poor Richard Sermons mentioned shapechanging clay people, and nothing on the subject came to Cal’s mind out of his considerable repertoire of songs, either.
The hand dropped to the leaves and not-Sarah spun away and fell to its knees, roaring in rage. It no longer had Sarah’s voice, but that deep, ragged howl Cal had drawn out of it on Calhoun Mountain. Good, Cal thought. I hurt the blasted thing.
He stepped forward, grunting in pain as he raised the tomahawk.
Something caught his foot and Cal stumbled. He looked down; not-Sarah’s severed hand was stuck to the sole of his moccasin, fingers gripping his foot tightly.
“Jumpin’ Jerusalem!” Calvin swore, shaking his foot but not freeing it from the tenacious white fingers.
Not-Sarah lumbered to its feet and turned to face him. The severed stump of not-Sarah’s wrist writhed and bubbled as it stepped forward. Gray knobs popped out of it, and then elongated into tendrils, and the tendrils hardened into fingers that sprouted nails and then webbing among the fingers thickened into a palm.
It grew another hand to replace the lost one.
The hair on the back of Calvin’s neck stood up. Part of his brain screamed at him, telling him to run, to get back to Sarah and warn her. But he couldn’t run, he couldn’t take the risk that this thing would get past him.
There had been two of these things before—where was the other one? Maybe Thalanes had been tricked out of position and was already dead, and Cal was the last line of defense. Calvin had promised the Elector he’d take care of her.
Dread filled him, and resolve. His tomahawk hand trembled with the will to strike.
He wished he still had his purse, but his precious silver shillings were at the bottom of the river.
He needed to chop off bigger pieces.
Calvin lurched forward, off-balance because of the hand that clawed at his foot and ankle, and smashed down with the war axe. He aimed for the creature’s bicep, but it saw the attack coming, and rather than move aside, it stepped closer to Calvin.
The tomahawk bit into not-Sarah’s shoulder and sank deep into its torso, releasing more clay-stink but no blood or gore.
Not-Sarah punched Cal in the stomach, pushing his breath out of him in a painful gasp.
Cal wrenched at the axe handle in vain, crying out from the effort and the sharp stabbing pain in his ribs.
Not-Sarah dove forward, wrapping its arms around Cal’s chest in a bear hug, burying its face in his shoulder and squeezing. “Aaaaaaaggh!” Cal yelled, tears whipping from his eyes. He flailed at the axe and knocked it free, but with the same motion sent it flying out of his reach.
The creature squeezed again, and Cal howled. He scrabbled at not-Sarah’s face and wrapped both his hands around it, pushing. He felt its skin sliding around under his fingers, like the loose peel of a grape.
With a desperate sob, he snapped its head back.
Nothing broke, nothing cracked, but not-Sarah’s neck bent at a sharp angle, and its head twisted back to touch its own shoulder blades. And stayed. Cal stared in shock and horror down into the noseless face of the creature, smelling the reek of the river rising from its orifices and stretched and torn skin.
“What are you?” Cal demanded.
“My name is Legion!” not-Sarah growled in a deep, rotting voice, and then laughed like a maniac, eyes staring up past Cal at the late afternoon sky.
It squeezed him again, and Cal wept from the pain.
* * *
Obadiah Dogsbody slapped the mule’s hindquarters. “Get on, ye!” he shouted at the balky string of animals.
The hindmost beast rooted its hoofs in the ground and brayed.
“’Ark ye, I said to move!”
Once, he would have diverted himself by imagining the rump he was spanking belonged to something other than a foot-planting, cantankerous jenny, and idled away time on the trail looking forward to his next visit to a town large enough to have a significant complement of generously proportioned women. But Nashville had such women, he’d seen them hanging out of second-story windows and whispering to him from the darkened doorways of the seediest taverns, and their lush, juicy blandishments had left Obadiah completely cold.
The pleasure of rough sport had dried up for him, as had all his others. Beer was sour, tobacco turned his mouth bitter, food he ate only because he needed to live. Obadiah was losing weight, enough that his jacket and breeches began to hang off him in an unseemly fashion, and he was preoccupied.
He kept thinking about her.
He was so appalled with his own behavior, he could barely bring himself to even identify the her in question, but it was the little Appalachee minx, Witchy Eye, Sarah Calhoun, as the other Appalachee called her.
He remembered his first glimpse of her, replayed it over and over again in his mind, her standing in the bubbling crowd of the Fair
, purple shawl with gold suns proud and queenlike around her shoulders, eye flashing, back straight and strong. Obadiah had seen proud Queen Caroline once, on his first day at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. That was before the officers had told him he didn’t have the makings of an artilleryman or an engineer after all, and begun drilling him with a pike, and Obadiah had stood proudly in line in his scarlet brushed wool coat, black tricorner, and white sash.
He’d heard the chanters and the drums and smelled the estuary on the breeze as the queen rose under a slate-gray sheet of English sky to the great menhir, straight-backed in her silk dress to pour out a libation of strong ale to Wayland Smith before the academy’s ranking godi dragged the first of his sheep onto the unhewn stones.
The queen had been glorious and indomitable in English red and white and she’d touched Obadiah’s heart. He’d been a little bit in love with her, and in that moment he’d been proud to be a soldier. He’d have given his life for Queen Caroline, much more readily than for her husband, King George Spencer.
Witchy Eye touched his heart, too. Not in quite the same fashion.
It wasn’t that he thought of her in a…in a fleshy way. He wished that was it—lust was something he was familiar with, lust he could understand, and he could gratify it or distract it with the satisfaction of some other desire. This was different. He didn’t think of her with physical feeling at all, but with something sweeter, something that might have been kindness and tenderness.
He was beginning to think of himself as weak, as Obadiah-who-had-gone-soft. By the Hammer, sometimes he caught himself wondering what he needed to do to be a better man for Witchy Eye.
He disgusted himself.
It had all started with her curse. She’d hexed him, and he remembered that during her hex, he’d felt tingly from his head to his toes. His ears had echoed full of birdsong and his every step had been cushioned by soft, sweet grass. Then the Right Reverend Father had undone the spell with a bit of silver—and Obadiah wasn’t interested in being hexed again—but the world hadn’t gone back to normal.
Instead, it had become a cold, dead thing, a dry husk, a mouthful of parched corn that Obadiah chewed because he had to, when what he really wanted to do was to spit it all out and sink what teeth remained to him into something sweet, bite into the fruit of the tree of life, juicy and cool and perfect.
He wanted the feeling back, and he hated himself for wanting it, but he didn’t think he could live any longer in such a flat, tasteless, unsalted world. He had lived a life with meaning for those precious minutes while he had been hexed, and he wanted that back. He wanted Queen Caroline at the menhir.
He wanted to be in love again.
It had been so long.
It was afternoon, crisp and cool, and Obadiah was returning from Nashville. The mules loped into the Blues’ camp, a little further up the slopes of Calhoun Mountain than Obadiah would have liked, but he understood that they needed to be this close to keep their cordon around the Elector’s people. The Blues stood twelve-hour shifts at key points around the mountain, watching to make sure Witchy Eye (as she was coming to be generally called among the Imperials) didn’t escape.
The Calhouns took no notice and hid nothing, walking in and out through the blockade as bold as mice, spitting at the soldiers and mocking them. Faces grew harder on both sides and the mountain bristled with rifles, but nothing had yet come to blows. When they weren’t standing watch, the Blues slept in camp or drilled, riding, moving in and out of formation on foot and on horseback, and especially shooting. For hours at a time, Calhoun Mountain was covered in a shroud of blue gunpowder smoke from their obsessive practice.
Obadiah assumed that one purpose of the drilling was to menace the besieged Calhouns, but the Appalachee didn’t seem intimidated. They just watched with disdainful grins, and once in a while one of the dragoons would find his notched bark target snatched out of his sight by the shout of a distant rifle, generally followed by gleeful hollering from the limestone redoubt.
Responsibility for keeping the whole operation fed and watered had devolved upon Obadiah. That was fine with him. He’d driven the wagon for his father’s cooperage many hard miles around southern England; he’d done it again for the Royal Pikemen in the Academy; and more than once, his duties for the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton had included acting as muleskinner or teamster.
He tied the mules and checked the regiment’s heavy iron cauldron that he kept bubbling over the fire on a tripod of lashed logs. Someone had eaten—that made it time to throw in more ingredients.
Obadiah set about unloading the mules’ packs and organizing himself to tend to the perpetually-cooking stew, picking his way among Blues dozing in their little two-man tents. He occasionally kicked at an arm or leg flopped in sleep across his trail, but doing it made him think of his Witchy Eye and feel guilty, so he tried to restrain himself.
Obadiah set a scarred cutting plank and piles of meat and vegetables on a camp table beside the cooking fire and began to cut.
“I’m not soft in the head, and what I’m telling you is no mere whimsy,” Father Angleton was saying. He and Captain Berkeley sat at the light wooden folding table under the high-walled tent that served as the camp’s headquarters. “My mind is as clear as it’s ever been, and I’m an honest and a God-fearing man.”
“But are you a prophet, Parson?” Berkeley asked in a cold and insolent drawl. He had his ever-present deck of Franklin’s Tarock, and was dealing cards out face up in front of himself, in the simple triplet that he favored.
The Tarock was a New World obsession, something the old Lightning Bishop had borrowed from the Florentines or the French (before Bonaparte imposed his Caliphate and ended such occult frivolities) and fiddled with to fit it to the land of the Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi River. It was effeminate, the kind of thing women did for entertainment behind closed doors. No self-respecting Englishman could take seriously any purported attempt at divination that didn’t involve the death of at least one animal.
“I endeavor to be sensitive to the things of the spirit, myself,” Berkeley continued. “See—again I draw Simon Sword. Simon Sword, the wild child, the berserker, the forces of the natural world unhinged, the bringer of trial, and above all the harbinger of judgment. Always judgment, everywhere I see. Judgment and the Horseman. Judgment and the Emperor. Judgment and the Priest. Judgment and the Lovers.”
Obadiah chopped turnips and tried to hide his interest. The Lovers—could that mean him? Was his love to be judged? Or what did the Lovers card signify—relationships and choices, he guessed, wishing for once that he had been behind more fortune-tellers’ curtains in his life. Sacrifice, maybe. Permanence. Sharing, intimacy, giving, love.
It had been a long time since Obadiah had thought of such things.
“You cannot pretend to equate such parlor games with the word of the Lord.” The Right Reverend Father’s disdain was clear in his voice.
“Do you mean the word of the Lord in the Bible?” Berkeley spoke slowly, which made his speech sound insulting. “Or do you mean the word of the Lord to you personally?”
“Both!” Angleton snapped. “The disciples didn’t sneer upon the writings of the prophets just because they had the Lord Himself with them.”
“Oh, I had misunderstood.” Berkeley smiled devilishly. “I had thought you were merely a prophet, but now I see that you consider yourself the Lord God of Heaven.”
Angleton’s face stiffened and his voice grew cold. “Do not insult me and do not blaspheme. And do not pretend that a man who believes in God must believe in any other manner of foolishness that happens along.”
“Blazes, Parson, do you not believe in judgment?” Berkeley asked, teasing. “Or do you not believe in Simon Sword?”
Obadiah cut pork into strips and threw them into the stew.
“I believe in judgment.” Angleton set his jaw in a straight line. “Judgment comes for every man, as surely as death.”
“And taxes, Parson,” Berkeley finished the saying for him.
“As for Simon Sword and other such bogeys,” the Right Reverend Father continued, “a man may believe in many powers and yet not serve them, nor approve their service.”
“Judgment is but change,” the captain observed. Obadiah realized he’d stopped working on the stew and was staring. “We all change, we’re all judged. The Horseman, the Priest, the Emperor…” He considered the cards. “It’s the damnedest thing, Parson.”
“Yaas. And yet you play with it constantly.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean that I haven’t drawn one of the Minor Arcana since I came to Nashville. Not one key, not one coin, not one cup, not one bolt of lightning. I’ve been turning the cards for days, and all I ever find are the Major Arcana.” Berkeley drew another card, smiled at it, and then held it up for Father Angleton to see. “I had hoped speaking of it might break the spell, but here again I have drawn the Drunkard.” He turned and waved the card in Obadiah’s direction before slapping it down on the table.
Obadiah’s ears burned and he went back to work, stowing casks of beans and flour under an oiled cloth. It wasn’t fair. He drank, but he didn’t drink more than any of the dragoons. Or not much more, anyhow.
And besides, since he last saw Witchy Eye, he hadn’t been drunk once.
“My Lord has given me a vision,” Angleton insisted quietly. “Your belief or lack of it, and your endless mooning over a deck of cards, are utterly irrelevant. The one to be judged will be the girl with the bad eye. And I shall preside over her trial.”
* * *
Sarah surveyed the room’s contents in a single glance: half a dozen pallets, wool blankets, rough stone fireplace, stack of split wood.
She leaned her white ash staff into a corner. “It isn’t homey, but it’ll do. At least we don’t have to sleep three to a bed.”
Thalanes hitched up his gray robe and knelt. He swept aside a carpet of ash with a log and stacked several thick pieces of wood in the fireplace. “Let’s get the fire going. We don’t want to delay your bath.”
“Calvin’s got flint and steel,” Sarah said.